Archive for March, 2014

Buzzfeed has a list of all 339 books mentioned in Gilmore Girls. It wasn’t a show I was ever interested in, but it’s an impressive list. I’m curious how many shows could match it.

Amazon customers got some refunds from publishers. I think the whole lawsuit is ridiculous, and I still want to see the publishers just not sell their books through Amazon. If they really worry about Amazon becoming too powerful, cut off the supply and begin creating a new ecosystem centered around their own websites selling their books. They could also hook up with Apple in the future, or MS, or throw more weight behind Barnes & Noble, and create their own website similar to the itunes store. In the end, I don’t trust Wal-Mazon.

Writers, go (mid-) West. Alright, I did have a long blurb here but wordpress hiccuped and lost it. Good post, a lot of good links to further readings from recent writers of the midwest. I’m searching for Rust Belt Chic from my local library right now.

Can book reviews hurt a book? Well, yeah. That’s part of the reason you will read few overly negative reviews on this blog – I don’t feel a need to help bury someone who is trying to make a living. I bend that rule to greater degrees for increasingly famous authors, though.

Alright, a couple of these have been sitting on the stove for a bit too long, hoping for the water to boil and something a bit more to come out about them. It’s not happening. Lately, I’ve been in a bit of a haze. Not sleeping well, kid’s been a handful at school, getting stuff around for the house, taxes, etc. Life. The whole thing is just wearing me down a bit. anyway. Try to pick up the slack this week.

Over on IO9, there’s an article debating how we read and whether it is the right or wrong way. I sort of bristle at the idea of right and wrong ways of doing most things, let alone reading. All of us have individual ways of getting from points A to B, and as long as you get there, I’m not sure the “rightness” always matters (obviously outside of doing some sort of willful harm to others as you make your journey). While people may have fewer marathon sessions with a book in their hands while reclining on the couch, I’ve come away from such sessions with little long term memory of the book I had just read – often too exhausted to remember or having passed by everything too quickly for it to gestate. By the same token, reading in too small of blocks can leave a book feeling fragmented, disconnected. In the end, I think our habits generally come to conform to how we digest what we’re reading. If we can take in a bunch of small chunks of reading and put it all together, we’ll do it that way. If we can’t, we won’t, because the experience won’t be fulfilling enough to continue (at which point we may just give up reading altogether). Maybe a follow up question should be about how well we monitor ourselves and know how we’re reacting to what and how we read. Our reading habits may have less to do with distractions and more to do with a lack of self-awareness.

Publisher’s weekly has an article chock full of charts and graphs about what’s popular in kid lit. Perhaps what is most frustrating is how encompassing the category “children’s literature” is for the article. Something that combines YA and picture books and tries to give an idea of what genres are popular…yeah. Not sure how well all of them overlap and how clear of a picture it paints. Might help if I was interested in that segment of publishing, though.

I don’t like Philip Roth and he has a long ass interview in The Times. I have a (bad?) habit of tuning out things like interviews when I get the sense of something I disagree with, so most of this interview didn’t really register past my eyeballs. It seems more self-serving than anything, as he tries to get out ahead of his critics and define his legacy. If he is going to give up on writing because it was just so difficult for him, I don’t mind if he gives up on commenting about it, too. I’ve never been able to get in to his work, though.